Federal
Judge Rules EPA Cannot Skip Pesticide Review -Endangered Species Act
Victory!
(Beyond Pesticides, August 29, 2006) A federal judge
has ruled
that the Bush administration violated the Endangered Species Act
by creating a regulation to bypass wildlife agencies in its review and
licensing of pesticides. On August 24, U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour
of Seattle overturned the regulation, which attempted to streamline
approval of pesticides by ignoring the protection of the nation's 1,200-plus
endangered species. As a result, the Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) will once again be required to consult federal wildlife biologists
before licensing pesticides, a major victory for the nine environmental
groups that filed the suit against the U.S. Interior Department two
years ago.

In 2001, environmental
groups sued over EPA’s failure to consult with the National Marine
Fisheries Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service before allowing
certain pesticides to be sold. Judge Coughenour ordered EPA to conduct
such consultations in determining whether 55 of the pesticides were
likely to harm salmon, reported the Seattle
Post Intelligencer.

Instead, in 2004,
the administration created a new rule allowing it to ignore the "consultation"
requirement of the Endangered Species Act - a part of the law
it had been ignoring for at least a decade. With hundreds of pesticides
and endangered species across the country, requiring multiple agencies
to agree on their potential effect could be a logistical nightmare;
officials reasoned EPA should decide on its own whether pesticides were
likely to harm protected species.

In a second ruling,
U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour said the Bush Administration’s
change reflected a "total lack" of scientific justification
and that there were "disturbing indications" that the administration
deliberately muted dissent from government scientists. In a footnote,
Judge Coughenour added: "The court feels compelled to note that
there are disturbing indications in the record that the very structure
of the service-EPA cooperation was engineered (by EPA) to conceal or
minimize the positional differences between the services and EPA."

The Center
for Biological Diversity, one of the plaintiffs, reported government
data show that pesticides already jeopardize more than 375 endangered
or threatened species across the country, according to Silent Spring
Revisited, a report released in July of 2005. Species of owls,
salmon, frogs and sea turtles are jeopardized by pesticides that are
applied to or drift into their habitat or that flow into waterways from
farms and yards. Amphibians, including California's tiger salamander,
red-legged frog and mountain yellow-legged frog, are among the most
vulnerable to pesticides. Also, some of California's rarest fish - salmon,
steelhead and delta smelt - are exposed to the chemicals from agricultural
and urban runoff.

Sentinel species
have alerted humans to chemical hazards for decades and provide important
signals necessary to protect public health. “The fact that data
about pesticide effects on endangered species were ignored in risk assessments,
which are required in the pesticide registration process, further undermines
the validity of EPA’s risk calculation,” said Eileen Gunn,
project director of Beyond Pesticides.

For more information
on EPA's failure to protect endangered species see The Center for Biological
Diversity's report.